Julia Nishizaki – Looking Outwards – 10

This week, I chose to look into the San Francisco startup, Melomics Media, and their computational system for automatically composing music. Melomics has created two “computer-musicians,” Iamus and Melomics109. Iamus is a computer cluster which is currently located at the Universidad de Málaga in Spain, where it was developed in 2010. Iamus composed “Opus One” on October 15, 2010, which was the first fragment of professional contemporary classical music to be composed by a computer in its own style, as it was not attempting to copy a previous composer’s work. A year later, “Helo, World,” Iamus’s first complete composition premiered, and in 2012, the London Symphony Orchestra recorded 10 of Iamus’s pieces, creating “Iamus,” the first studio album composed using this computational system.

It takes Iamus 8 minutes to create a new composition and to output this data into multiple formats. According to the Universidad de Málaga’s website, the algorithm that Iamus uses is built on data-structures that act as genomes in order to create possible compositions.

While listening to “Hello, World” I was surprised by both how contemporary and dissonant the piece sounded, and how an entire, fairly coherent piece of chamber music could be composed by a computer. However, the constant tension in the piece, combined by the very human musicians and their interpretations gives “Hello, World” an uncanny valley feel, because the piece is technically music, but something still seems slightly off. I’m curious as to why Melomics decided to go in this direction, rather than to create music that is composed of “new” sounds and is entirely unplayable by humans.